At the studio: mono.kultur / Kai von Rabenau

Disclaimer: As a reward for reading all of the following words, you’ll find the possibility to win something.

Over the last few years, I’ve often been asked how much longer I thought it was going to be until printed publications would go extinct. Because naturally I, someone who publishes online (as in: the antipode of offline), would totally oppose everything printed on paper. Like online publishing is on something a kind of religious mission striving for world domination. Though it all sounds terribly 2009, this phenomenon is scarily present in the fight against subscription and ad sales losses most print products face these days. Still, I do not have the saving answer, despite saying out loud that I do love print! I mean, you get to choose the paper, and a format, and a cover (or umpteen covers, as seems to be necessary these days), and there is just no equivalent way to do a correlating double-page spread in a browser. So yes, there are a dozen reasons to still do print products, at least in my Weltanschauung.

I have to admit, I seem to honor only a few of the gazillion available magazines by actually walking to the store and paying money in order to read them – but they do exist and one outstanding exemplar is the Berlin-based mono.kultur, a publication I’ve eagerly followed since attending the event celebrating their Miranda July issue in Spring 2008 at Scala (which no longer even exists, oh oh Berlin…). So of course I said yes to spending an hour of my more than restricted time (you might remember I’m working on finalizing my thesis) at their office in a lovely Kreuzberg backyard on the occasion of their new issue.

Portrayed here is Kai von Rabenau, the head and motivator of a team of ten writers. Being a photographer and magazine lover himself, he started mono.kultur back in 2005, searching for contributors by, quite classically, putting a flyer at the Pro.qm bookstore. The concept of mono.kultur is simple and has grown out of economic necessity – they never managed to finance the print of their dummy, which included several interviews, so they decided on spreading them over single issues, starting with Carsten Nicolai, Frank Leder, and Nine Inch Nails. This turned out to be a genius idea, making it possible to create a new design for each issue, resulting in fabulous editions on Tilda Swinton, Dries van Noten, Dave Eggers, and many more. (Also note the reprint of their Taryn Simon issue on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie.)

Their newest issue, “Refine for Now”, focussing on Chris Taylor, the bass player of the fabulous Grizzly Bear, has just been released and will be officially presented this Wednesday night at L.U.X. in Kreuzberg. Good thing is: you’re all invited! Even better: Kai agreed to present us with five copies of the new issue, so if you want to share some of my print-joy and win one of those five, just leave a comment saying you want one under this post before Thursday, Nov 10, 8pm! (The winners will be announced in the comments – so take a look on Thursday night!)

/mary

ps, in case you can neither make it to the release event tomorrow, nor win one of the issues, you can still follow mono-blog.

In one of my classes this past semester we actually discussed the future of print media and its cultural significance and its future. I believe that we all came to a unanimous agreement that print media will not die. Especially as long as there are academic outlets and so forth. May it find a difference niche? Probably. But I don’t see the days where I won’t be able to buy a book or a newspaper in my lifetime. Especially in big cities, New York, Berlin, Paris, London etc, where so many people rely on public transit. Print media is so important in that demographic for those commuters.

As scary as the digital/e-publishing “revolution” may seem, I’m positive that it can never fully replace the long-term love affair we humans have with printed media. The physicality, and permanence of books, journals and magazines, etc. are just too good to let disappear! Plus, you can’t tear out a page of a magazine with Chris Taylor’s picture to put on your wall if it’s a page from a blog!(Und ja… ich wäre auch sehr erfreut eins dieser Magazine zu gewinnen!)

Arrived in Berlin 2 months ago but only just got internet where i am… so just found out about your magazine. I have started a personal blog about the future post consumerism as the ‘M.O. of our lives’ http://kulturcrack.blogspot.com its v early days, I will def be looking for your mag! great motivation, thanks!